Dark Matter: Jacob Frank and Georges Bataille

Dark Matter: Jacob Frank and Georges Bataille

Jacob Frank remains one of the most unsettling figures in the history of religious thought — not simply because of his antinomian theatrics or his deliberate profanations, but because his teachings articulate a vision of matter that resists both classical gnosticism and rationalist secular materialism. While the gnostic imagination traditionally casts the material world as a prison to be escaped, Frank inverts the schema: matter becomes the privileged site of revelation, the very medium through which the divine must be sought. His is a counter‑gnostic materialism, one that refuses transcendence not out of atheistic disenchantment but out of a conviction that truth resides in the low, the impure, and the abject.

This article examines how Frank’s theology — if that word can still be used — reconfigures the relation between matter and spirit by collapsing their hierarchy and insisting on the primacy of the material. In doing so, Frank anticipates Georges Bataille’s ideas on gnosticism and “base matter,” which locates the sacred not beyond the world but in its most degraded and excessive forms. By tracing the contours of Frank’s counter‑gnosticism, we can begin to see how his movement forged a radical alternative to traditional religious metaphysics — a materialism that is neither reductive nor disenchanted, but ecstatic, transgressive, and often profoundly destabilizing.

Before turning to Frank’s and Bataille’s overlapping notion of “base matter” and their shared gnostic materialism, it is worth underscoring the extent to which materialism functions as a foundational premise within Frank’s thought. Indeed, Frank’s utterances display, as Jay Michaelson rightly points out, a thoroughgoing materialism, quite at odds with the mystical strain of Judaism espoused by messianic precursor Sabbatai Zevi. For Frank, otherworldly doctrine has no place — worse, it has no power — in the material world.

Michaelson is surely right when he states that “there is no place here for the metaphorical and the spiritual: only the material is true.” Religious claims predicated upon non-material explanations, such as spiritual or metaphysical doctrines, are critiqued, even ridiculed and parodied. Appeals to spiritual causes and laws — prayer, ritual, dietary rules — amount to little more than magical thinking.

Not that Frank is opposed to magic; rather, for him magic — what he calls a “deed of union” through which he is joined with the divine (perhaps by way of a sexual rite) — is legitimate only when grounded in material conditions and producing material, empirical effects, such as wealth, power, transformation. Life is a material business; direction of travel is from the spiritual to the material and any religion that preaches otherwise is bogus. As Frank says, “I only look at what God does on the earth.”

Beyond the more conventional pursuit of power and riches (“gold”), the Frankist quest aims — according to Michaelson — at nothing less than the transformation of Frank and his followers into “semi‑immortal beings who will ride in gilded chariots, own huge mansions, and eat gourmet meals.” Indeed, there is a telling passage in Frank’s writings that illustrates his belief that sensual delights outweigh conventional piety: 

"I will furnish my court and conduct it in gala dress. I will give all sorts of parties with food and drink. I will have my own musicians, theatre with its actors, and all will dance and rejoice in common, young and old alike, and that which stands will be fulfilled: As they stood to play before Saul, so the spirit of God rested upon him, for my God rests nowhere else but only where rejoicing and gaiety reside."

For Frank, power and glory were to be tasted in this world, as sensual and material as any bodily pleasure. Beauty, purification, rejuvenation, immortality, and even height, were promised — gifts that outstripped the conventional Judeo‑Christian hope for resurrection. Freedom from divine judgement and an end to religious authority were also on offer to the faithful. Michaelson observes that the Frankist drive toward wealth, health, perfection, and eternal life mirrors, in striking ways, the alchemical quest to transmute matter:

"Like the degrees of masonic initiation, this staged quest depends on the knowledge of certain magical secrets and is entirely materialistic; the world operates according to materialistic (if secret) principles, and one should use the knowledge of those principles to one’s personal aggrandizement."

In effect, religion becomes the raw substance for a transformative ascent into worldly force. Michaelson’s insistence on “knowledge” and “secrecy” is apt, for these terms summon the memory of early gnosticism and its promise of salvation through hidden truths. But Frankism flips the schema: a counter‑gnosticism in which the material eclipses the spiritual, the mirror‑image of the gnostic hierarchy it echoes. In this sense, Frank’s teaching becomes a doctrine of gnostic materialism. 

It is apt at this point to bring in Georges Bataille. Gnostic materialism forms one of several points of contact between Frank and Bataille. Bataille’s most explicit engagement with gnosticism appears in his essay “Base Materialism and Gnosticism.” His anti-theological reading is deliberately idiosyncratic, stripping gnosticism of the metaphysical idealism that marked its first- and second‑century formulations. Recasting gnosticism as a celebration of the very materiality it once sought to transcend, Bataille elevates matter’s darkness, sovereignty, and excess. Matter is not passive, not a degraded emanation of spirit, but an eternal and creative force, an active principle that is “endowed with its own “eternal autonomous existence as darkness (which would not be simply the absence of light).” 

At first glance, the notion of gnostic materialism appears paradoxical because it fuses two seemingly antithetical orientations: the gnostic impulse toward hidden knowledge, transcendence, and liberation from the material world, and the materialist insistence that all phenomena — including consciousness, spirit, and revelation — are reducible to physical processes. Gnosticism traditionally posits that the material world is a prison or illusion, crafted by a demiurgic power and that salvation lies in secret knowledge (gnosis) which reveals the true, immaterial source of being. Frank’s gnosticism rejects immaterial essences; it is a knowledge of this world grounded in the claim that the decisive things in life — power and longevity — arise solely from matter in motion. 

And just as gnosticism seeks the triumph of light (spirit) over darkness (matter), Frank told his followers that he would lead them into the darkness. Only in the deepest darkness — what might be termed a dazzling darkness – where the holy and the unholy intermix, does a “far greater brightness” reveal itself. 

By insisting that salvation can be achieved only through an antinomian immersion in the very substance of existence, Frank’s gnostic materialism — grounded in the claim that it is the spiritual, not the material, that requires transcendence — destabilizes conventional distinctions between the sacred and the profane, turning everything of the spirit back into flesh. 

And by declaring that “it is my desire to bring life forth into this world” Frank stands in stark opposition to the quasi-gnostic Christ of John’s Gospel, whose profound assertion that “my kingdom is not of this world” is neatly illustrative of the barely-concealed gnostic subtext of the Johannine literature. 

Frank’s gnostic freedom — grounded as it is in worldly things — is inseparable from his antinomianism. Frank promises to accomplish what neither the biblical patriarch Jacob nor Christ could: to free the world from all laws and statutes and to draw the flow of life from the upper world into this one — what Robert Akers describes as “the unbridled flow of life which liberates man because its force and power are not subject to any law.” It is only when the world is freed from laws and statutes — but without jettisoning the world itself — will the good God reveal himself.

Frank’s libertinism, however steeped in material appetite, remained religious at its core; like all antinomian impulses, it depended on the very moral law it sought to defy. Indeed, it is only through the suspension — indeed, the overturning — of the Law that the messianic truth latent within Judaism can finally emerge. The Judaism of the “future” (“in the end the Laws will be forgotten by the Israelites; but you were chosen for the future”) envisions a community no longer bound primarily by halakhic obligation. In its place arises a quasi‑secular horizon defined by land, wealth, power, and territorial sovereignty, intertwined with quasi‑magical promises of rejuvenation, heightened stature, and even the conquest of death itself. This future Judaism is not a refinement of the Law but its displacement: a transformation of religious destiny into material, political, and bodily transcendence. 

By repudiating Jewish law, Frank proclaimed that moral and social redemption could only be achieved through the annihilation of normative structures that encompassed, but weren’t limited to, sex. Yet he insisted that he did not violate positive commandments at all; the laws he shattered were, in his view, merely negative. For Frank, “all religions, all laws, all books […] came forth from the side of death.” Yet this radical overturning was not devoid of form; it was cloaked in ritual and symbol, even when those rituals appeared as parodic inversions of conventional religious practice. 

Frank’s so‑called “strange deeds” — frequently alluded to in his writings — were presented as gestures of liberation from established religious authority (“I came to Poland only to nullify all the laws and all the religions”). Only through such transgressive gestures, he taught, could the Frankists enter the divine and carry Jewish history toward what they understood as its climatic moment. Frank’s antinomianism foreshadows Bataille’s conception of “sovereignty,” which finds expression in negative, even nihilistic, acts of freedom that are stripped of utility.

For Bataille, anyone who eludes the explanatory frameworks of society or the state may be regarded as a “sovereign” individual (“evil is not transgression, it is transgression condemned”). Sovereignty is expressed in the breaking of taboos, in eroticism, and in the enjoyment of transgressive acts emptied of instrumental purpose. 

It is here that Bataille locates the sacred. If Frank pulls down the sacred into the world, Bataille’s sense of the sacred unfolds not along a vertical, transcendent axis but starts and ends on a low-lying horizontal plane — the domain of human sexuality, even when that domain takes shape in the dim, compromised spaces of brothels, clandestine rooms, and voyeuristic encounters. (No wonder, then, that Bataille once remarked that “my true church is a whorehouse — the only one that gives me true satisfaction,” a declaration that could easily have been uttered by any number of Sade’s fictional characters.) 

For Frank, sex could not be collapsed into sensation, nor into transgression emptied of purpose. His libertinage is largely untouched by pointless violence or sex; it remains anchored in a religious cosmos — far from Bataille’s bleak disenchantment. Moreover, Frank’s project is utilitarian in the sense that the material things of the world are subordinated to the goal of achieving them. Besides, Bataille has no use for Frankist promises of gilded carriages, rejuvenation, or purification. 

Insofar as sacred is conceived in immanent, bodily terms, immanent to material processes, materiality itself harbours the sacred from the outset. Put another way, the sacred erupts from matter’s excess, its violence, its baseness, its own self-wasting limits. For Frank, though, the sacred is conferred upon material form by bringing the former into the latter via a deed of union between the upper world and this one. 

If for Frank the spiritual is useless and ineffective without the material, for Bataille it is the sacred that is useless — but that uselessness is precisely its value. Indeed, the sacred is sacred because it is useless, without telos. Its ecstasy lies precisely in in this refusal of ends, in the deliberate squandering of energy, pleasure, and meaning, even when such waste culminates in exhaustion. Indeed, the yearning for  expenditure without return, without purification, without the fantasy of recuperation, is at the crux of Bataille’s antinomianism: the law to be violated is not Jewish Halakhic law (as it is in Frank) but the utilitarian logic of productivity and procreation. Bataille’s libertinism is no messianic overturning; it is an existential plunge into an unstructured erotic intensity, a confrontation with the taboo of non‑productivity itself. 

(Interestingly, Bataille sounds a note of caution about the perils of such uselessness, which can easily shade into depletion. The erotic — especially what he calls “erotic licentiousness” — can culminate in “depression, disgust and the inability to continue.” In this respect, Bataille diverges from Sade, whose characters seem to possess an inexhaustible appetite for violation, whether erotic or violent. It differs too from Frank who makes several references in his writings to ‘completion’ rather than ‘depletion’ — the completion of his work, the completion of the biblical patriarch Jacob’s task to further the cause of Judaism.) 

Frank’s insistence on the material over the spiritual — and his repeated use of “base,” “debase,” and the broader motif of “abasement” — anticipates, however obliquely, Bataille’s emphasis on the base and the abject. This emphasis is central to Bataille’s effort to purge materialism of any relation to otherworldly spirit or Platonic form, stripping it of every residue of idealism and insisting on matter freed from all ontological hierarchies, including the Marxist hierarchy of matter over spirit.

Though Frank is less extreme — bringing the upper world down to earth and mingling it with matter rather than abolishing it altogether — he nevertheless insists on the need to dig down into matter, into the muck and mayhem of the world, including the main three monotheistic religions, with all its “teaching, laws, religions and bad ways.” The reward for this descent is not spirit but a special kind of knowledge (Das) that confers good health and immortal life (as well as a  convenient sideline of material gains). Frank himself was not exempt from the process — “I also descended on your account for I was told: Go down! I must enter Das” — the difference being that he is the trailblazer:

"And so I must take on myself all the pains and plagues and completely bear the troubles until thereafter the good God renews and rejuvenates my years like the eagle rejuvenates, I will be powerful and healthy forever. So all people from whom I want to make people, then it is necessary for them to bring them down low and humblest, thereafter to raise them up tall and highest, as it stands with you: I will refine and test them."

When Frank told his followers “base things about Bucharest, about dealings with women,” he is not confessing vulgarity; he is reframing the profane as spiritually operative. For Frank, lowness, abasement, and debasement are not moral failures but necessary stages in a cosmic process of transformation. Salvation, we are told, must emerge from “a low and base place.” Frank repeatedly insists that only from the lowest point can infinite rising begin: “[F]rom among the lowest of the low, as we are, our abasement down to the very bottom, it will be so that our rise may go on forever upwards.” Similarly, the ‘divine feminine’ is described as descending into the abyss so that her rise will be “without foundation and never cease.” 

If debasement functions as a spiritual technique, a ritual unmaking of social, moral, and metaphysical order, then the base emerges as a metaphysical site, a place where hidden knowledge resides. And yet for Frank, base matter remains something to be passed through, a necessary descent on the way to a higher restoration. In this respect he differs sharply from Bataille, for whom base matter is not a stage but an end: a sovereign zone where the sacred already inheres, requiring no sanctification from above and no teleology of ascent. Bataille refuses any movement beyond the low; the base is not a threshold but the very terrain of the sacred itself. 

The juxtaposition of Jacob Frank and Georges Bataille reveals two distinct yet convergent attempts to rethink the relation between matter, the sacred, and the transgressive. Frank’s counter‑gnostic materialism, grounded in a radical inversion of Jewish metaphysics, transforms the material world into the exclusive arena of revelation and redemption. Bataille, by contrast, strips gnosticism of its metaphysical scaffolding altogether, locating the sacred not in a redeemed materiality but in matter’s own formless excess. What unites them is a shared refusal of transcendence and a commitment to the low — to the base, the abject, the impure — as the privileged site of truth.

Yet the divergences between them are equally instructive. Frank’s descent into matter is ultimately teleological: a necessary passage toward restoration, sovereignty, and the fulfilment of a messianic horizon. Bataille’s descent has no such end; it is a sovereign expenditure without return, a plunge into the useless and the unproductive that resists every promise of completion. Frank sacralises the material by drawing the upper world downward; Bataille discovers the sacred already immanent in matter’s darkness, requiring no sanctification and permitting no ascent. If Frank’s antinomianism seeks to overturn the Law to inaugurate a transformed world, Bataille’s seeks to escape the very logic of utility that underwrites both law and redemption.

Reading Frank through Bataille — and Bataille through Frank — thus illuminates a broader, more unsettling genealogy of materialist mysticism. Both thinkers expose the instability of the boundary between the sacred and the profane, revealing how easily the spiritual collapses into the material and how insistently matter resists being subordinated to any higher principle. Their respective visions of “base matter” challenge not only classical gnosticism but also modern secular materialisms that imagine matter as inert, passive, or disenchanted. In their hands, matter becomes a site of danger, revelation, and transformation — a domain in which the sacred is neither transcendent nor absent, but immanent, volatile, and profoundly disruptive.